Vybz Kartel has earned his first Canadian certification, as his 2016 single Fever passed 160,000 units to land a Double Platinum award from Music Canada on November 5, 2026. The vybz kartel fever double platinum canada milestone skips Gold and Platinum entirely, a decade after the song first appeared.
Fever was released in June 2016 on the album King of the Dancehall. Ten years on, the record is still moving, and Canada is now the market where it has climbed highest per capita, ahead of the Gold certifications it had already collected in the United States and the United Kingdom.
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Fever Double Platinum Canada Numbers Tell The Story
The Canadian award, reported by DancehallMag on November 6, counts combined physical sales and streaming equivalent units. Fever first earned a Silver award in the United Kingdom in February 2023, then a first UK Gold on July 3, 2026 after passing 400,000 units there, according to the British Phonographic Industry. In the United States, the Recording Industry Association of America certified the song Gold in February 2020. Kartel also added a UK Silver plaque for Summertime in June 2025.
That sequence matters. Fever is not riding a launch week, a remix campaign or a viral spike that fades in a month. It is a catalogue record that kept piling up streams year after year until the numbers caught up with its reputation in dancehall.
Why Canada, And Why Toronto Heard It First
Toronto has one of the largest Caribbean communities outside the region, and dancehall has been woven into the sound and slang of the city for decades. Kartel played a sold out show at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto last year, and the listeners filling that room are the same audience keeping Fever in rotation at fetes, in cars and on playlists across the Greater Toronto Area. A Double Platinum Canadian plaque for a Jamaican dancehall record is, in large part, a Toronto story.
No major label. No marketing budget. Thanks to my fans in Canada.
That was Kartel’s own framing on Instagram as he listed the new plaques country by country, in a post reported by DancehallMag. The independent route makes the Canadian number harder to dismiss: 160,000 units accumulated without a major label push in this market.
A Decade Old Record Still Climbing
Fever first appeared while Kartel was still in prison in Jamaica, convicted in 2014 after an arrest in 2011. His catalogue kept travelling without him until the Privy Council overturned the conviction in 2024 and he walked free that summer. Since then the certifications have arrived in a steady run across three countries, and the Fever video has passed 100 million views on YouTube.
For Toronto’s Caribbean diaspora, the plaque formalizes something the city’s parties settled years ago. Fever is a standard here. Now the paperwork from Music Canada says the same thing, at Double Platinum level, and the next question is which Kartel record follows it into the Canadian books.
